This row isn’t something I’ve covered yet on WUWT, and I’ve generally stayed out of the fight going on between Nisbett and Mann’s best friend, but I thought Nisbett’s rebuttal article linked below deserved the wider audience WUWT can provide.
This all got started with a breach in journalistic standards, by ignoring a media embargo, which gets you on the fast track to isolation. Keith Kloor has commentary on it.
This issue all seems to be over who gets more money in the climate wars. Nisbett correctly pegs the greens, writing:
Based on the analysis in Chapter 1 of the Climate Shift report, it is no longer tenable to assert a David vs. Goliath narrative when it comes to comparing the financial resources of the major national environmental groups and their opponents among conservative groups and industry associations. Greens bring in vastly more in revenue, spend more on all programs, and spend more on all activities specific to climate change and energy policy than these longstanding opponents.
Dr. Michael Mann says in this Mother Jones interview:
“Climate science has basically been at the receiving end of the best-funded, best-organized smear campaign by the wealthiest industry that the Earth has ever known—that’s the bottom line”
Reality says otherwise, take for example the greens outspending the supposed “big oil” campaign of AB32 in California last November:
California’s Prop 23 and the “big oil money” campaign – outspent 3 to 1
Here is Nisbett’s response. It is well worth a read.
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Why is anyone surprised to see oil company money supporting the climate change cause. They know there is no substitute for oil in transportation and they don’t own much of the oil reserves anyway. However the oil companies are long on natural gas, there is abundant supply, and it’s easy and economical to change electric generation to natural gas. So oil (& gas) company support for climate change is actually a mechanism to sell more product to power the grid.
P.S. If you want to p__s-off you green friends, explain to them how Exxon and BP will benefit from their climate change advocacy.
Climate organisations, left wing groups and other lobbying bodies have a natural advantage in the finance stakes over most companies, after all they don’t have to provide a financial payback for their investors/share holders. All they have to pay back is hot air, sorry I mean rhetoric. It would be a totally different ball game if their future revenues were based on their actual performance, most would be broke by now.
It is interesting how much each side directly spends, but this pales in the light of the hundreds of billions spent by governments for scientific grants to Universities, funding their own gov scientific organizations and in the “propaganda hardware” such as UK’s 50B+ outlay on wind generation – you don’t need cap and trade if you can shut down coal (and nuclear) plants and preferentially select non-carbon (high cost, low reliability) energy generation and charge the “customers” 4 times the cost of fossil -fuel energy generation. These huge expenditures on hardware and the enormous PR costs to put them over should be counted in the battle costs – here it is a ratio of 100sB to zero for the green Czars.
I’m still going through it, but I find Dr. Nisbett’s report very interesting. So, too, the controversy: Dr. Brulle, as a compensated reviewer, spent several weeks trying to shape Dr. Nisbett’s message, then, after sharing the report before publication decided to step out of the line of fire. I suspect Dr. Nisbett’s conclusions were not really surprising to anyone, including Joe Romm, and that Dr. Nisbett’s primary error is releasing a public report. Joe is protecting the narrative, even though he knows it to be false.